Knowledge Focused from PolicyStat’s Policy Management

Modern healthcare is an intensely demanding business undertaken by complex organizations with great pressure to deliver quality. The need to capture and codify best practices on a wide range of topics and then disseminate that knowledge throughout the organization is very great for reasons both operational and regulatory. As a result, management and staff expend substantial effort managing thousands of discrete policies.

The current status quo solution for policies and procedures is storing Microsoft Word documents on a shared drive. This necessitates ad-hoc emails and spreadsheets, minimal staff feedback, no control over consistency and rampant duplication. Only slightly better are the legacy document management systems that provide rudimentary search and a modicum of process around Microsoft Word files.

This information bottleneck not only reduces quality of care but also exposes the organization to regulatory and legal risk.

We believe that the document-centric method of capturing and disseminating organizational knowledge is fundamentally broken. Instead, PolicyStat shifts focus to the actual knowledge embodied in each policy. This means your information is available via smart search that nearly instantly locates and displays your information all in your browser. Providing feedback, making changes or inviting collaboration is only a few very-fast clicks away.

Instead of a document-based free-for-all where individuals are responsible for both information and its presentation, presentation best practices are defined once by an expert upfront, and authors are free to focus their efforts on what actually matters – the knowledge. We’ve applied lessons learned in professional publishing, where separating content and presentation is the norm (via tools like LaTeX) and created an environment where untrained users can reap the focus, collaboration and consistency benefits offered by a content-centric approach.